1 He = Henry Dorsett Case, computer cowboy and protagonist of William
Gibson's breathtakingly popular first novel, Neuromancer. If
Case's sidekick, Molly, is an ex-moll, and if his immediate boss,
Armitage, is both armored with the merest vestige of an unfurling
personality and armored for his high-orbit Armageddon, then Case is
encased in a shell that does not allow him to feel. Uninterested in the
meat world, his body in a sense lacks sensation, becomes a prosthesis for his mind.

As with most of Gibson's characters, then, through a certain
optic Case is intertextual heir apparent to Natty Bumppo, the archetypal American, according at least to D. H. Lawrence's definition of the
notion in his discussion of Cooper's Leatherstocking novels -
"hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" (73) - a cultural
stereotype admired and appropriated to one degree or another by Poe,
Melville, Thoreau, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, film noir,
John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger,
________________, ________________, ________________, ________________,
________________ (fill in the blanks; present the absences), behind
which rest two others: the American frontier (Case is a computer cowboy)
and the American cowboy (Case is a computer cowboy), with their
connotations of freedom, ruggedness, discovery, and solitude. Encased
Case keeps to himself unless he has to do otherwise to survive, skirts
the fringes of a grim society, speaks in monosyllables, shows more
passion toward his cyberspace deck than any human in his life. He
voyages into a desolate world where he encounters various trials, then
rides his computer into an electronic sunset with a lover named, yes,
Michael. In such a narrative realm, whose decentered center appears to
be the virtual reality called cyber-space, egocentrism appears to be
rendered virtually complete, characters self-absorbed, routinely
seclusive, disinterested in their surroundings except to the extent that
those surroundings are interested in them. When they privilege private
reality over public, they exhibit (one could argue) a mild case of
autism.

Wed to that American arche(stereo)type of the cowboy is (and here we
begin at least circling my main point) the arche(stereo)type of the
European romantic artist: Goethe's Werther; the Byronic hero; the
isolated, self-reliant, gloomy, questing, sun-staring visionary rebel.
As much as Case descends from Natty Bumpo with his cowboy garb, stripped
language, and tough-guy ways (the culmination of the novel is, after
all, a kind of metaphoric "shoot-out" with Neuromancer in
cyberspace), he also descends from the romantic wanderers in quest of
the (here electronic) infinite that always remains just beyond reach. A
Ulysses of virtual reality, he voyages into a magical realm where he
undertakes various adventures, then returns home transformed; although
he loses his Circe-Calypso in Molly, he gains his Penelope in that woman
with a parodic man's name. The character Henry Dorsett Case morphs
into the character Bobby Newmark (the new easy mark), whose body decays
while his mind exists solely in the infinite cyberspatial disembodiment of the aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive; into the character Gentry as well -
a crazed prophet searching for the unifying Shape, the modern
metanarrative - whose ideas harmonize well with the surrealist
imagination, which asserts, along with Andre Breton, that "the real
process of thought" lies in "the omnipotence of dream"
(602), that "the poet must turn seer" (605), that "it is
time to have done with the provoking insanities of
'realism'" (613). Cyberspace is nothing if not the
(dis)embodiment of dream, vision, the fantastic.

2 Operated. He'd operated. Here: "functioned,"
"managed," "conducted oneself." Carrying, too, a
distant military charge (Case launches an "operation," an
attack, on Neuromancer), medical (Case "operates"
electronically on Neuromancer's defenses), and, most important,
mechanical. Machines "operate." Case, devoid of feeling (as
most of the characters in Gibson's project are), has more in common
with machine than man. "I saw you stroking that Sendai," Molly
tells him, noting how he interacts with his cyberspace deck; "man,
it was pornographic" (Neuromancer 47). Case has sex with Molly, but
he gets down and dirty with his hot box.

McCoy Pauley, Case's mentor, took his nickname, Dixie Flatline,
from his interface with a computer. Now he (it?) is a construct, a
disembodied cybernaut, his personality downloaded into a program that
talks, responds, reasons like Pauley, and yet is not Pauley, and yet is
Pauley. Like Slothtop in Gravity's Rainbow, he (it?) possesses
nearly no temporal bandwidth, experiencing time only as a series of
"nows." When Case asks if he (it?) possesses sentience as
well, Dixie Flatline answers that it "feels" so. "But
I'm really just a bunch of ROM," he (it?) adds.
"It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess....
But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI,
it just might. But it ain't in no way human" (131).

Or is it? Characters in Gibson's project exhibit limited
internal action in the form of thoughts and feelings. They come closer,
in fact, to acting like highly complicated automata. They seldom ponder
ideas. They cannot love. They cannot even hate in any traditional sense.
As a rule, they feel close to nothing. Wintermute, the artificial
intelligence, on the other hand, is driven by a passionate longing to
connect with its other half. It schemes, betrays, murders, not out of
reflex or circuitry, but out of deep desire.

By posing such questions as Are humans simply highly complex robots?
and Can machines feel and desire? Gibson joins a philosophical
conversation that has been unraveling since the seventeenth century. In
1641, Descartes asserted that the human body should be considered a
machine and that animals should be considered automata lacking thought
and feeling. About a hundred years later Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a
French physician and philosopher, combined these ideas and extended
Descartes's notions to include the human mind. We are, he said, no
more than conscious machines. He thereby interrogated that part of us we
hold most free. The other side of the equation - that machines can in
fact think and exhibit purposive behavior - surfaced during the 1940s
with the development of cybernetics. The British logician, A. M. Turing
(hence the Turing Police in Gibson's first novel), asserted in 1950
that it was theoretically possible to manufacture a thinking machine.
Indeed, he said, in the future it would be possible to build a machine
with intelligence and purposive behavior. Only human prejudice would
prevent humanity from conceptualizing the resulting cybernetic construct
as another human mind.

To the extent Turing suggests that intelligence merely consists of a
series of potentially well-distinguished tasks, he agrees with the
characters in Neuromancer, who are characterized by what they do rather
than by what they think or feel. Lewis Shiner, Gibson's friend and
a member of the original group of cyberpunk writers, recalled to me
Gibson talking about a college course he took on American Naturalism in
which he encountered, and was deeply impressed by, Nelson Algren's
The Man with the Golden Arm, a text where characters are defined by
external rather than internal action. This impulse is reflected
throughout Neuromancer, a text that privileges high-speed and often
high-tech movement over static and low-tech contemplation. Molly
registers this thrust when she claims: "Anybody any good at what
they do, that's what they are, right?" (50).

3 On. And so we travel on to Gibson's central questions
operating within the case of the human: Who am I? What am I? What is my
relationship with the world? Where do I stop and others begin? Why am I
not a machine? Why is a machine not me? What constitutes human identity?
What makes me the same person today as yesterday, as thirty-eight years
ago, as tomorrow, if anything?

4 An. Weakened variant of one from the Anglo-Saxon. Article
indefinite as the human itself. Before, during, and after it, anything
can happen. Like cyberspace (there's my point again, circling).
Like the play(giarized)ground of postmodern narratology.

The human in Gibson, in these deeply Ovidian times, always teeters on
the verge of becoming something inhumane, inhuman, less or more than
what we (who?) once took for granted about the human. It can easily be
destroyed by drugs, as Case realizes when he watches Linda Lee's
"personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting
away" (8); altered by cosmetic surgery as with Angelo, the Panther
Modern, whose face is a graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage
polysaccharides. Selfhood (dis)appears to be nothing more than forgery,
whether it takes the form of Case's string of false passports,
Armitage's handsome inexpressive mask covering Corto's
insanity, or the Panther Moderns' camouflage suits.

Wintermute comments, in one of his various pseudohuman incarnations:
"I, insofar as I have an 'I' - this gets rather
metaphysical, you see - I am the one who arranges things ..."
(120). When articulating identity, language slips; syntax comes up
short. Even Wintermute's sureness of purpose decomposes in a
sentence that fumbles and fractures as it attempts to speak personality.

5 Almost. We are almost there, almost at my point of departure. But
back, first, for a moment, to the indefiniteness of an, to the slip and
stutter, the epistemological hover, the ontological hesitation
(dis)embodied by that almost word.

In Count Zero, the sequel to Neuromancer, the Wintermute-Neuromancer
entity comes apart in cyberspace almost immediately following its union.
Scatters. Becomes, from one perspective, a plethora of subprograms,
Lyotardian micronarratives, language games, each relatively as good (or
bad) as any other, and, from another perspective (science fiction is a
genre all about seeing, all about other perspectives), a host of voodoo
gods haunting the matrix. Like Tzvetan Todorov's fantastic,
Gibson's project thus tends to keep at least two possibilities (and
usually a plurality of them) open at once, twice: here scientific
explanation side-by-side with (alternative) theological discourse.
Discursive worlds thereby shift, become narratologically amphibious.
Gibson ambidextrizes the beliefs about existence that those discursive
worlds suggest. Compartmentalization and hierarchism become virtual,
become an almost ... but not quite. Each discursive world becomes simply
one of many, relatively as good (or bad) as any other. De(re)valued, the
resulting configuration refuses absolute significance and closure.

The reader enters an in-between that just keeps gnawing onward.

6 Permanent. And so nothing remains "permanent" here. The
reader inhabits an Ovidian space of possibility, a space that
exemplifies the virtual, a virtual space, cyberspace. "VR is not so
much a medium in itself, as a technology for the synthesis of all
media" (Ryan). The reader enters the radically unstable geography
of termite art.

When attending the University of British Columbia in 1976, Gibson, as
he told me, came across an essay by the iconoclastic film critic Manny Farber called "White Elephant Art and Termite Art." Originally
published in 1962, it became part of Negative Space, a collection of
Farber's essays, in 1971. It is one of the few essays that directly
influenced Gibson's aesthetics. In it, Farber distinguishes between
two kinds of art. The first, for which he holds contempt, is
White-Elephant Art, the sort that embraces the idea of a well-crafted,
logical arena, incarnated in the films of Francois Truffaut. Proponents
of this near-school produce tedious pieces reminiscent of Rube
Goldberg's perpetual-motion machines that exude a sense of their
own weight, structure, and status as masterworks. The second kind of
art, which Farber advocates, is Termite Art. This is the sort that
stands opposed to elite aesthete culture, embraces freedom and
multiplicity, and is incarnated in the films of Laurel and Hardy.
Proponents of this near-school produce pieces that gnaw away at their
own boundaries, leaving little in their wake except traces of
enthusiastic, assiduous, and messy endeavor.

Gibson's termite project is nothing if not extreme, contentious,
conflicted, ambivalent, the product of a kind of bricoleur's
brinkmanship. Most often considered a science-fiction writer, Gibson
obviously employs various extrapolations of technology or
pseudotechnology but he also appropriates, as we have seen, stylized
cowboys, scouts, and bad guys, the adventurous frontier mentality, and
motifs of the shoot-out and barroom brawl from the western. From the spy
thriller, which portrays a Pynchonesque vision of contemporary reality,
he borrows the convoluted plot; ideas of international conspiracy; vast,
bewildering political or corporate powers; secret agents; and evil
henchmen. He lifts low-life sleuths and criminals, archetypal tough
guys, mysteries solved through the collection and interpretation of
clues, seedy underworld settings, clipped prose, and sparse dialogue
from the hard-boiled detective genre. He adopts a sense of pervasive
magic, horror, ghosts, long underground passageways, and dark staircases
from the gothic novel and formal distortions, bizarre characters,
decadent settings, absurd incongruity, and a fascination with the
irrational and abnormal from the southern grotesque tradition. From the
tradition of the Erziehungsroman, he takes the plot of education that
traces the psychological journey of a youth from innocence to
experience, like Bobby in Count Zero and Kumiko in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

In other words, he transmogrifies writing into writing-as-network. In
the following passage, for instance, Case returns to his sleeping
compartment from a hard day only to meet Molly for the first time:

Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.

"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday
night special you rented from the waiter?"

She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She
had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox muzzle of a
flechette pistol emerged from her hands.... She wore mirrored glasses.
Her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the
temperfoam.... She shook her head. He realized the glasses were
surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow
from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a
rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white,
tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial....

"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the
hatch.

"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case.
My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work for.
Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you."

"That's good."

"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's
just the way I'm wired." She wore tight black gloveleather
jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to
absorb light.... The fletcher vanished into the black jacket....
"You try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the
stupidest chances of your whole life."

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread,
and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter
scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.

She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. (24-25)

As Paul Alkon points out, emphasis falls not on scientific detail but
on the marvelous. Unlike much science fiction depending on gadgetry for
its effects, Gibson's work usually focuses on the magic inherent in
a situation. Here the scene partakes of motifs associated to a large
extent with "pulp fiction transformed to a futuristic setting with
some appropriate changes of costume, decor and vocabulary" until,
that is, Molly reveals the scalpel blades inset in her fingertips
(78-79). Suddenly, the world tilts. Molly becomes, not a tough gal from
a hard-boiled detective novel, but a sorceress. The universe of
technology slips since "it is very hard to understand how a
four-centimeter (1.6 inch) retractable blade along with even a highly
miniaturized motor-mechanism could be implanted without impeding ability
to bend the fingers at their first joints, although some ingenious
explanation could doubtless be offered" (79). By refusing to
explain the technology behind this scene, Gibson as usual underscores
the scene's astonishing aspects. Much the same happens to the
cyberspace matrix itself, all glitter and flash without the mechanics.

A sense of the artificial pervades this scene as well from the
fluorescent lights to the fact that Molly is literally "wired"
differently from most humans. Like Molly, who is an amalgamation of
technology and humanity, the scene, emblematic of the text as a whole,
is an amalgamation of various narrative modes. Gibson here not only
brings together the universes of fantasy and science fiction, but also
those of the detective novel (the dingy setting, clipped prose, and
tough-guy dialogue), the western (Molly's boots, gun, and black
clothes suggest the archetypal evil cowboy), the spy thriller (Molly,
part secret agent and part low-life henchman, introduces the conspiracy
plot at this point), and the realist novel (the description of the
sleeping compartment is an accurate one of Japan's current low-cost
business hotel rooms). By mongrelizing discursive worlds, Gibson
mongrelizes the beliefs about existence those discursive worlds suggest.
Compartmentalization and hierarchism gone, each universe becomes simply
one of many, relatively as good or bad as any other. Thus de(re)valued,
each becomes one more instance of gomi (the Japanese word Gibson uses
for junk), refusing White Elephant ideas of totality, absolute
significance, and closure.

Danny Rirdan faults Gibson's prose style on a number of grounds,
including the fact that it both is "ambiguous" and embraces
"mystification for the sake of mystification" (44). But, given
the preceding, it is clear that ambiguity and mystification are exactly
what Gibson is after. In a characteristic move, Gibson
"mystifies" the above scene from the start by giving the
reader dialogue without accompanying tags: Molly speaks without the
reader knowing it is she who is speaking; then she is described; but
through a narrative sleight of hand she is not named until nearly two
thirds of the way through the passage. In addition, again
characteristically, futurist concepts and devices like the
"coffin" and "flechette pistol" are cited long
before they have been explained, so that the reader has the impression
he or she has missed the explanation. Frequently one must glean meaning
from context (as with the word "coffin" here), and sometimes
one must wait pages (sometimes forever) for illumination. The effect is
close to that of the cinematic jump cut found in MTV videos that
produces discontinuity in filmic time while drawing attention to the
medium itself. It is as though, as Donald Barthelme has claimed in
another context, that, just as modern painters had to reinvent painting
because of the discovery of photography, so contemporary writers have
had to reinvent writing because of the discovery of film (26).

The reader is further disoriented by the Pynchonesque premium
Gibson's style places on poetic information density. Gibson is
infatuated with detail and inventory, from the pepperbox muzzle of the
flechette pistol to Molly's heels sinking into the temperfoam, from
Molly's hairstyle to the color of her fingernails. This infatuation
is foreign to most science fiction, not to mention more mimetic modes.
Gibson regularly loads his sentences with a blend of high-tech jargon,
brand names, street slang, and acronyms that lends an overall sense of
urgency, intensity, and at times congestion to his style. He commonly
uses prose as others might use poetry. Words like "cyberspace"
and "black matte" are repeated with the incantational power of
figurative language.

Gibson utilizes colors with a similar poetic intensity. In the above
passage, as in much of Gibson's fiction, black and white dominate
and tend to occur in succession. Molly's jacket, jeans, boots, and
presumably hair are black and seem "to absorb light," just as
Molly is in the process of "absorbing" Case into a deadly
conspiracy. Her cheekbones and fingers are white; rather than
traditional associations with innocence and purity, though, this color
in Gibson's work carries associations with the pale skin worn by
the living dead like the Draculas in Mona Lisa Overdrive. Gray - the
color that appears with the next greatest frequency in Gibson's
fiction and is negatively associated with such things as Mona's
johns, the dead earth, and the aleph - is absent in this passage, but
its metallic double, silver, appears in Molly's mirrorshades and,
apparently, her scalpel blades. Silver is ordinarily associated with the
technological in Gibson, as is its near cousin, chrome. Black, white,
and silver coalesce here in a visual pun that transforms Molly into a
femme fatale, a phallic female, a "catty" woman who is half
animal, half machine.

Three significant metaphors inform the passage: (1) the lenses of
Molly's mirrorshades seem to "grow" from the skin above
her cheekbones; (2) Molly acts violently because she is
"wired" that way; (3) her clothes appear to "absorb
light." This again is indicative of Gibson's poetic prose.
While a number of rather conventional metaphors occur in Gibson's
fiction, simply linking attributes of two objects from some generally
similar category, the most interesting ones often link something natural
with something artificial. Mirrorshades "grow" like plants out
of Molly's skin. Molly's behavior is "wired" like a
machine. Her clothes "absorb light" like a black hole. If the
romantic metaphor makes nature familiar and technology unfamiliar, these
postmodern metaphors make nature unfamiliar and technology familiar.
Such metaphors also partake in the aesthetics of the unpleasant, its
roots trailing back to the poetry of Eliot and, before him, Baudelaire.
For Gibson, a road is "dead straight, like a neat incision, laying
the city open" (Neuromancer 87). The plot of a soap opera is
"a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour
itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and
thrust" (Count Zero 51). Given such astonishing use of language, it
may easily be argued that Gibson's focus is not on conventional
plot at all, but on accumulation of detail and turns of phrase.
Gibson's fiction is less about what happens or to whom or where
than it is about style. Like Molly herself in the above passage,
Gibson's is a fiction of artifice. In this way, Gibson (as he says)
is a termite artist par excellence in that he tends to zero in on
"the little corners of things more than the way the whole thing
looks" (Tatsumi 7).

Often Gibson's emphasis on writing-as-network, ambiguity,
mystification for mystification's sake, information density,
obsession with detail, highly metaphoric prose, and the aesthetics of
the unpleasant adds up to a sense of confusion and uneasiness on the
reader's part. Dropped without much exposition into an alien and
sometimes obscure future world, the reader is put in the uncomfortable
position of having to make decisions about meaning and moral value based
on very little textual evidence. If trained as a modernist, ready to
search for patterns of intelligibility, the reader experiences an
analogue of what John Brunner calls "overload" (53) and Ted
Mooney "information sickness" (36), a radical disorientation
before a plethora of facts that might or might not connect.

Gibson reminds us about this condition numerous times in the course
of his fiction. At the end of Count Zero, Turner gives Angie a biosoft
dossier and says: "It doesn't tell the whole story. Remember
that. Nothing ever does" (241). The dossier, like the novel itself,
supposedly holds a narrative that should make sense of things. But at
the same time Gibson offers the possibility of significance and closure
with one hand, he subjects that possibility to contradiction or
cancellation with the other. Just as the dossier (to which neither Angie
nor the reader gains access) "doesn't tell the whole
story," so too Count Zero itself promises meaning only to defer
meaning to its sequel, Mona Lisa Overdrive, which itself concludes, not
with illumination, but with a promise that truth is just around the
corner and that we'll arrive there "in a New York minute"
(260) though, ironically, Mona Lisa Overdrive is the last book in the
trilogy, and the only "meaning" the reader can obtain in a New
York minute is to return to the beginning of the trilogy and start
reading again. The story almost makes sense, but not quite. The
almost-making-sense seems to indicate meaning has only been deferred
temporarily. But that is not the case. Meaning, it slowly dawns on the
reader, is contained in the failure to achieve meaning.

7 Adrenaline. Enthusiastic, assiduous, messy, and fast. Like what
happens in cyberspace. Or with those two key metaphors in Gibson's
Virtual Light: (1) the San Francisco bike-messenger service, one of
whose employees, Chevette Washington, steals a pair of virtual light
glasses (which produce images in the brain by stimulating the optic
nerve without employing photons) from a grotesque man at a party on an
angry whim; and (2) the Oakland Bay Bridge, abandoned by the city after
a megalithic earthquake, slowly homed by the homeless, and currently the
topic of a (re)search by a young Japanese scholar named Yamasaki
attempting to employ the bridge to understand American Kultur.

Gibson's use of the first metaphor nods in a gesture of
appreciation and appropriation toward the major means of transportation
in his friend Lewis Shiner's 1991 novel, Slam, about the
anarchistic world of skateboarding, underground economies, and computer
networks. The bikes, like Shiner's skateboards, are emblematic of
environmentally conscious no-fuel freedom, intense energy, exhilarating
flash, and sexy fashion: the cultural inscriptions of the technohip.

The patchwork dwellings on the broken bridge - from bars to tattoo
parlors, sushi shops to rag-tag shelters, inhabited by those living on
the edges of our culture - indicate something else, too. They "had
occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique
and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic.
At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by
torchlight, [the bridge] possessed a queer medieval energy" (62).
Or, elsewhere, the dwellings "had just grown, it looked like, one
thing patched into the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this
formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. There was a
different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for
what it had originally been used for" (178). A model, surely, for
postmodern America itself. For the chapters in Virtual Light, as well,
most of which are no more than five or ten pages long, like those in
Count Zero, and which form a structure of intersecting plots that move
inexorably toward a unifying (?) climax. But, most important for my
(here it is again, almost) point, both bridge and text are also emblems
of termite art.

They just keep gnawing onward.

Adrenaline. The heart of Gibson's project. Look, for instance,
at "The Winter Market" and the two views of art Gibson
presents there. One romantic, one purely postmodern. The character Lise
represents the former. When Casey (another encased case) listens to her
voice, he hears "levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing
cruelty" (121). She is literally isolated from others, living in
her exoskeleton, helpless without it, self-absorbed, able only to take
from others, unable to make love. She is self-destructive as well,
refusing to tend to the sores on her wrists caused by the exoskeleton or
to her addiction to the drug wizz. When Casey jacks into her mind, he is
so moved by what he feels that he cannot stop himself from crying. Her
de(re)formed body is controlled by forces outside her, but her
imagination, hers and no one else's, is dark brilliance, "able
to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into
Jung's sea, and bring back - well, dreams" (123). Dreams?

Rubin Stark, by stark contrast, is a gomi no sensei, a master of
detritus, a bricoleur, a termite artist, who never likes to refer to
himself as an artist. The idea strikes him as too precious, pretentious,
ponderous. Predecessor of Slick Henry in Mona Lisa Overdrive, he wanders
the city "like some vaguely benign Satan" (119) gathering junk
to construct whimsical de(con)structive robotic sculptures suggestive of those by Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories. Rubin is
not overly concerned about success. He does not take his art especially
seriously. He cruises for his ideas among the aisles of the
late-twentieth-century cultural hypermart, ready to shoplift, ready to
see what falls into his cart.

8 High. Adrenaline high. What it all comes down to - up to - in
Gibson's pluriverse. Enthusiastic, assiduous, messy, and (here, at
last, my point) cyberdelic. In other words, the definition of
cyberspace, the virtual area that manifests Gibson's idea of
termite art, a realm on the other side of the computer keyboard, through
the screen, the sublime electronic beyond that both exists and does not
exist, opens upon expectation, chance, burning bushes, voodoo gods,
exotic spaces, the notion of trespass, informational order joined to
informational subversion, a zone where anything can happen, everything
is possible, all fences are down, the dead can dance, the living die
(though usually, flatlined, only for a short time), the visionary be
made (hyper)(sur)real. A narratological region that continually chews
away at its own boundaries and hence the reader's, problematizing
everything from place to gender, identity to its own position in the
"world." Cyberspace is the symbolic territory of termite art.

And yet, of course, it is not really cyberspace we are talking about
in this essay: it is just words on a page describing a realm that was at
best barely nascent as Gibson wrote his first novel, a geography that
over time in the world outside the novel became informed by
Gibson's sense of it. Gibson's linguistic simulation of
cyberspace, that is, became mimicked by cyberspace after the fact. From
our present point of view, however, we understand those words are only
simulations of a virtual area that did not fully exist when the words
describing it were first generated and does not fully exist now in the
manner Gibson said it might.

In other words, Gibson's cyberspace does not exactly function
cyberspatially. How could it? Even in the best of all possible worlds we
are restricted by the distance between print and "reality."
But to question that relationship leads us to a related query: in what
sense can a hypertextual essay, this hypertextual essay, function
hypertextually when limited by its existence on the flat, linear,
non-hypertextual page? The answer is in no sense. And in several. Or,
better yet, just as Gibson's ?? simulates cyberspace, so too does
this ?? simulate hypertext. The latter forms a critifictional
correlative for the former, suggesting that termite writing might at
least possibly benefit from a termite reading that attempts to avoid the
white elephant of traditional academic essaying by performing termite
art's contradictory circus of the mind in motion in what that mind
perceives to be a micronarrativized pluriverse. Secondary text parasites
(and para-cites) an already parasitic (and para-citic) mode,
transforming a "primary" text into an already-secondary one
that serves as host to an already-secondary text that moves to become,
briefly and ironically, primary.

We are left, then, with an unstable field of play, a precarious
playfulness, a Barthesian termite arena, "a multi-dimensional space
in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash" (Barthes 146).

9, The halt, the hesitation, the Todorovian suspension, the
Barthesian bliss, the Derridean absence made present, of cyberspace,
opposite of Gibson's frightening external future(-present) of the
dark polluted Sprawl, Dog Solitude, Chiba City.

From one (yes) perspective, the matrix is an extrapolation of
spatial-data management systems studied at MIT, NASA, and elsewhere.
From another, it is an idea that came to Gibson while walking down
Granville Street in Vancouver. There he saw kids playing in video
arcades and noticed "in the physical intensity of their postures
how rapt these kids were.... And these kids clearly believed in the
space these games projected" (McCaffery 272). Here the matrix
functions as a metaphor for the mass media's (the adrenaline high,
the wizz, those kids' raptness) addictive sway over our
culture's consciousness. But cyberspace too raises questions about
the relationship between religion (voodoo gods, computer cowboys'
and those kids' trance states) and technology while also becoming a
major metaphor for memory itself - both individual and cultural - how we
continually reprogram and revise it, how our histories are, in a sense
at least, historiographic metafictions, a televised precession of
Baudrillardian simulacra, "the dissolution of TV into life, the
dissolution of life into TV" ("Precession" 365). Many of
Gibson's characters (think of Kumiko in Mona Lisa Overdrive, Molly
in Neuromancer) exhibit a certain nostalgia for a past they have
redrafted almost beyond recognition. In "Red Star, Winter
Orbit," Colonel Korolev, the first man on Mars, cannot recall what
actually happened during his historic voyage; all he can recollect are
the videotapes, the cultural encodings and edited reflections of
reflections of reflections of the experience. Sandii in "New Rose
Hotel" tells her past differently to the narrator each time it
comes up, rerighting herself while rewriting yesterday.

The gothic quality of the cyberspace matrix - haunted as it is by
spirits of the dead, littered with electronic trap doors and dark
electronic corners, a mysterious nexus where some other world can always
irrupt within this one without warning - implies the landscape of the
irrational psyche, which in turn implies a metaphor for mind-body
dualism. Characters entering cyberspace leave their bodies behind, lose
themselves in the magical mental terrain of the matrix, from a (yes)
certain point of view shed the conventions of hard science fiction for
those of hallucinatory fantasy, Poeian play in extremis. Case, to cite
one example, lives for the "bodiless exultation of cyberspace"
while exhibiting "a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh."
For him "the body was meat." When he steals from his
employers, they retaliate by damaging his nervous system with mycotoxin,
dulling his edge at the computer console. Case, (again) encased within
his faulty epidermal prophylactic, perceives this event as a
"Fall" from grace that forces him to remain locked in
"the prison of his own flesh" (6), unable to partake of
imagination, the art of negative space, the negative space of art, the
realm that works as an analog for our late-twentieth-century experience
of watching termite film, reading termite fiction, witnessing what
Kroker and Cook call "the real world of postmodern culture":
television (229).

10 A. Article indefinite as the narrative space of the matrix itself.
Before, during, and after it, anything

Shiner reminded me of other contemporary writers such as Don DeLillo,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Jay Cantor, J. G.
Ballard, Nicolson Baker, Douglas Coupland, and many more whose fictions
invite us to trip down hypertext lane, to see the novel as the tip of an
iceberg of information, a hypertext inviting, if not demanding,
exploration. (Landon 60)

The era of the novel will not end, but fiction as an adventurous
testing out of boundaries and frontiers may be an endangered species....
And even if fiction writers work antagonistically to subvert the
political vision, or lack of it, we should not expect any large,
over-arching books, although we may hope that our Mega-Novelists, or
some future ones, may find it in themselves to stir the pot in some
major way. A large movement in satire, such as we saw in Catch-22 in the
sixties, or some of John Barth and William Gaddis, may prove fruitful;
but the satire must have breadth as well as pungency. It cannot
particularize, or only particularize, but should spread, venomously,
across the entire land. (Karl 50)

There it is: form follows perception, and that's the way we see
now.

So, as Shed says, "human beings just got to tell stories,"
but the telling has been and is likely to keep undergoing change.
Between us, I'd be willing to bet that the most engaging novels of
the next seven or eight yea ...

[connection closed by foreign host] zi!/ox NO CARRIER (Wilde 100)

can happen.

11 Byproduct. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead is a $2,000 sweet
autobiographical prose poem about Gibson's childhood - about, like
cyberspace itself, memory - that exists in a cyberspatial electronic
elsewhere on disks, created in collaboration with the abstract
expressionist painter Dennis Ashbaugh, that self-destruct after one
reading. A metaphor for (un)total recall, as well as a thematic
exploration of it, Agrippa happens only in a vital gap that literally
nibbles away relentlessly at its own boundaries, performs rather than
simulates deconstruction, keeps gnawing onward.

12 Of. Yes. But of what? About what? Gibson's first novel
shortcircuits confident mappings by generating textual ambiguity and
instability from the title onward, a noun hosting a new romanticism that
embraces innovation and emotion: that intense subjective expressionism
particularly evinced in the cyberspace sequences, reverberations of
those final cyberdelic moments of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ironically, while characters in the text are emotionally bankrupt,
though, they exist in environments that are emotionally charged for the
reader of the text: Molly's high-paced invasion of Sense/Net,
Case's fragmented recollection of the operation to restore his
nervous system. The novel partakes in a new romantic longing for the
absolute, the electronic ether representing a (back to Lawrence, back to
those cowboys) frontier of consciousness. Case is a gloomy, alienated
twenty-four-year-old hacker, whom Ratz, the bartender at the Chat,
continually refers to mockingly as "the artiste." But, tone
aside, Ratz is right. An emblem for the Byronic outlaw writer who lives
in his memory and imagination, Case continually strives for the
transcendent reality locked within his computer console. Often going
days without eating or washing, seldom sleeping, he leaves the mundane
material world of meat behind and voyages through a purer landscape of
mind, where he encounters one visionary experience after another,
including death itself. He is a future Faust, his Mephistopheles
Armitage, his Satan Wintermute. More in keeping with Tennyson's
than Homer's Ulysses, however, Case never reaches the end of his
quest. Although he returns home at the conclusion of his mission, he is
beckoned on into the vast steps of data by Neuromancer, Linda Lee's
and Dixie Flatline's constructs, even some version of himself
(which is himself and not himself, another reflection of a reflection of
a reflection) wandering through the matrix. Wintermute and Neuromancer
also strive for a transcendent reality - cosmic unity - but fail to
attain their goal as well. At the moment of transcendence, as the reader
learns in Count Zero, they fracture into manifold gods or subprograms,
unable and/or unwilling to continue as a perfect form. The new
romanticism, then, is not ultimately about attaining the absolute, but
the failure to do so; less about product than process. Like the Duchamp
assemblage Molly comes across in the Straylight enclave, the suitors can
never (and perhaps should never) reach the bride.

13 Youth. Yes. But whose? Case's? No. He is an old man at
twenty-four, his reflexes not what they once were. By the novel's
end he has visited, like the narrator of Agrippa and like Ulysses
himself, the land of the dead and returned, and, to this extent, he is
not so much a neuromancer as a necromancer: the text is rife with
Lazarus after Lazarus, from Dixie Flatline in the form of a construct to
Linda Lee's structure in cyberspace. Ashpool intermittently awakes
from his cryogenic death sleep, and his child 3Jane perceives Wintermute
as a ghost (back to those gothic games), whispering in her ear.
Metaphorically, Corto is raised from the dead, a Frankensteinian
monster, when he is transformed into Armitage. But there is a
second-order necromancy here, too. Not only are characters raised from
the dead by a number of fictional magicians, but also various genres are
raised from the dead by the very real magician of magicians, Gibson
himself. In fact, his text ultimately becomes one about youth and old
age at a narratological level: textual regeneration and endurance. Forms
arise, undergo termiting transformations, and continue metamorphosed.
Gibson extends, challenges, endorses, subverts, and revitalizes the
science-fiction novel, the quest story, the myth of the hero, the
mystery, the hard-boiled detective novel, the epic, the thriller, and
tales of the cowboy and the romantic artist. He (re)presents old stories
in a revealingly revamped intertextual pastiche, a new version of a very
old virtual reality: the

For centuries, books have been the cutting edge of artificial
reality. Think about it: you read words on a page, and your mind fills
in the pictures and emotions - even physical reactions can result.
(Wodaski 79)

novel.

14 And. Yes. "And" the text functions as a neurological
romance, a kind of textual machine, imaginative mechanism, virtual
(termite) reality that activates and stimulates the human mind, thus
performing much like cyberspace itself does with respect to characters
within the text.

15 Proficiency. Are we then gaining a certain degree of
"proficiency" in understanding cyberspatial (termite) art in
Gibson's virtual reality?

(a) Yes.

(b) No.

(c) Maybe.

(d) None of the Above

Let's begin again.

16, The halt, the hesitation, the Todorovian suspension, the
Barthesian bliss, the Derridean absence made present, of cyberspace,
opposite of Gibson's frightening external future(-present) of the
dark polluted Sprawl, Dog Solitude, Chiba City.

Just as Dorothy momentarily abandons the uninteresting
black-and-white universe of Kansas for the dazzling polychromatic one of
Oz, so too do many of Gibson's characters abandon the polluted dark
universe of the Sprawl world for the pure multicolored one of
cyberspace. By doing so, they move from the realm of chronos to that of
kairos, from a prosaic geography registering realistic chronology,
logic, and stability to a transcendent one registering fantastic
timelessness, alogic, and possibility. Like their kindred spirit, Lewis
Carroll's curious Alice, they head down the hyper(hypo?)textual
rabbit hole, eschewing the decadence of the body and penetrate
Wonderland, embracing the imaginative splendor of the mind.

This mind-body dualism initially seems to arrange itself along gender
lines in Neuromancer. Reminiscent of (again) D. H. Lawrence's
scheme, males tend to be associated with the former, females with the
latter. Case is addicted to the mental landscape of the matrix and views
his body as so much meat, and Dixie Flatline's construct is pure
mind. Linda Lee, on the other hand, is perceived by Case as a body whose
mind has been destroyed by drugs, and Molly embodies pure body. Once a
moll in a puppet house, she is now a hired gun. Because of her jacked-up
nervous system, she possesses magnificent control over her reflexes.
Through her scalpel blades and mirrorshades, she has transformed meat
into art. Gibson sees her as a composite of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee,
Emma Peel, and Chrissie Hynde (Nicholas and Hanna 17) while Carol
McGuirk also recognizes in her the razor girl from Fritz Leiber's
"Coming Attraction" (McGuirk 122-23), and Samuel R. Delany identifies her as a version of Jael from Joanna Russ's The Female
Man (32). For Case, Molly is simply "every bad-ass hero"
(Neuromancer 213). Appropriately, then, she has had her tear ducts
routed into her mouth so that she spits instead of cries.

Here, however, the gender-specific arrangement begins to break down.
With Molly, Gibson has imposed stereotypically male traits upon a female
character. Simultaneously, he has also devalued those traits by implying
that they are part of the decadent material world that must be
transcended by attaining cyberspace, an area of being to which only
males have access in this text. Gibson further complicates the question
of gender by calling the sum total of cyberspace "the matrix."
The word matrix derives from the Latin for womb, from the Latin for
mother. So while it is true that only males have access to cyberspace,
it is equally true what they have access to is a female region that, it
turns out, is anything but womblike at least in any (stereo)typically
Freudian sense, given its charge of danger, hallucinatory power, and
subversive wonder. It is a region better described by using the terms
Barbara Creed does to delineate the female body and the uncertain future
evinced in recent SF films: "new, unknown, potentially creative and
potentially destructive" (408). Add to this that console jockeys
employ the sexual metaphor of

17 (Jacked.) "jacking in" when they speak of entering the
matrix (though the means remains unclear since computer cowboys use the
surely antiquated system of keyboards as well as neuroelectronic
connections to the brain), and we soon realize Gibson is not so much
underscoring discrete genders as he is the search for a union of
opposites. The male principle (Case, the computer cowboy, the mind)
strives to join with the female principle (Molly, the cyberspace matrix,
the body) in order to attain a sense of completeness. Case not only
penetrates Molly sexually, but also merges with her by means of the
simstim unit attached to his cyberspace deck. The couple performs most
efficiently and successfully at the moment of fusion when, interestingly
enough (and all sexual metaphors aside), gender no longer functions in
the algebra of their relationship. And yet, as with Neuromancer and
Wintermute, at the moment of union, of fusion, we also find disunion and
confusion: discrete personalities which both remain discrete (we never
lose a sense of who Molly is, who Case is) and integrated (the couple is
no longer a couple, but a functioning unit). We discover a sort of
technocentaur in our midst though the exact relationship between the
parts is unclear. Or, rather, that relationship shapeshifts. Easy
dualisms break down, are supplanted. Or, as Donna Haraway argues, the
cyborg becomes our operative metaphor, an ontology for the fin de
millennium: "it does not seek unitary identity and so generate
antagonistic dualities without evil" (154). Or, more precisely, it
both does seek a unitary identity, and it does not.

The technocentaur, the cyborg: another manifestation of termite art.

18 Into. Hence we once more find ourselves plunged deep
"into" a discussion about the quest for a union of opposites,
wholeness. Case and Molly seek physical and metaphysical connection;
Dixie Flatline conceives of himself as a combination of two brains, one
in the head and one in the tailbone; Case tries to bond with Linda Lee
early in the novel and later actually merges briefly with Neuromancer.

But the dominant manifestation of this trope takes the form of
Wintermute's compulsive attempt to join with its other. Many years
before, we learn, Marie-France Tessier rejected the illusory immortality
of cryogenics that Ashpool pursued. Instead, she decided to place her
personality construct into an AI, Neuromancer, thus enabling her to
"live" forever in the same way Dixie Flatline
"lives" forever. She also commissioned the construction of a
second AI, Wintermute, which would take over the role of corporate
decision maker. This would enable the Tessier-Ashpool clan itself to
become effectively immortal. After Ashpool murdered Tessier, however,
Wintermute began running the corporation on its own. Tessier, it turned
out, had built into Wintermute the compulsion to free itself from
reliance on others and to seek its other half. Wintermute, whose
mainframe was in Berne, began plotting to link with Neuromancer, whose
mainframe was in Rio. The nexus would be the Villa Straylight, clan
headquarters.

W = reason + action + (stereotypical) male

N = emotion + passivity + (stereotypical) female

Each entity suggests half the structure of the binary human mind,
half the structure of cosmic totality. United, they become an
all-powerful absolute metanarrative of the matrix. Like a god, they
become omniscient and omnipotent and instantly begin to fracture,
fragment, and fade.

19 A. Article indefinite as the meaning of this situation itself.
From one (yes) point of view, the Wintermute-Neuromancer plot concerns a
universal quest for harmony, wholeness, perfection. From another
(Gibson's sense of technology is nothing if not ambivalent), it
concerns the potential danger of out-of-control cybernetic entities.
This second perspective is reinforced by a number of similar plot lines
that cluster behind the one involving Wintermute and Neuromancer.
Perhaps most important is Steven Lisberger's Tron where the
technorebel protagonist, Flynn, battles a master computer obsessed with
ingesting and thereby uniting with other programs in order to gain
immense power and control in the matrix. Like Case, Flynn (whose name
also echoes Gibson's Finn) jacks into and briefly inhabits the
matrix. Another plot line summoned by the one involving Wintermute and
Neuromancer is HAL's in 2001, in which the master computer on the
Jupiter mission begins doing deals on its own, murdering three
cryogenically frozen crew members, killing a fourth outside the
spacecraft, and trying to control the sole survivor for its own
mysterious ends. HAL's plot line is emblematic of the many others
that touch upon the human fear of cybernetic or quasi-cybernetic
entities running amok (hardly, here, Haraway's positive feminist
reading of the cyborg). All of them track back through the industrial
revolution to the prototype of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Viewed
in light of Shelley's work, Tessier is the doctor who creates a
monster in order to achieve eternal life. Like Frankenstein's
creature, Wintermute longs for another of its species and will murder to
find it. And, like Frankenstein himself, Tessier is a(nother) romantic
Faustian figure who quests for the absolute and is willing to make a
pact with a demon to attain it.

Gibson simultaneously reinforces this plot line, however, and
reverses it: while a monstrous human (Tessier) creates a humanoid
monster (Wintermute-Neuromancer), so too does a humanoid monster
(Wintermute) create a monstrous human (Armitage). In each case, the
romantic hope of perfection falls short: creator loses control of its
creation.

The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is,
postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground
questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls "post-cognitive":
"Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves
is to do it?" Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on
the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world
which it projects, for instance: What is a world? What kinds of world
are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What
happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or
when boundaries between worlds are violated? (McHale, Postmodernist
Fiction 10)

troubled.

21 Cyberspace.

The passage of the subject into the pixels and bytes of
"invisible" terminal space addresses the massive redeployment
of power within telematic culture. In the content of a lost public
sphere and an altered mode of production, cyberspace becomes the
characteristic spatiality of a new era. In the context of cybernetic
disembodiment, rooted in nanoseconds of time and imploded infinities of
space, cyberspace addresses the overwhelming need to constitute a
phenomenal being. (Bukatman 156)

22 Deck.

The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of
himself, living in the greatest possible confusion.... What
characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of
estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical
separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the
absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no
defense, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the
overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without
obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being.
(Baudrillard, "Ecstasy" 133)

23 That.

Not everyone can read Neuromancer: its neologisms alienate the
uninitiated reader - that's their function - while its unwavering
intensity and the absence of traditional pacing exhaust even the
dedicated. The work is best experienced as something other than
narrative - poetry perhaps - so that the images may perform their
estranging, disembodying functions. The reader must jack into
Neuromancer - it's a novel for would-be cyberspace cowboys.
(Bukatman 152)

24 Projected.

Cyberspace also has a long SF pedigree, including all the many
variations on the SF motif of "paraspace": parallel worlds,
other "dimensions," worlds of unactualized historical
possibility, etc. (McHale, "Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk"
252)

25 His. Count Zero shares much with "his," Gibson's,
earlier work but also marks a number of departures from it. One of the
most revealing of these centers on Gibson's interrogation of
mind-body dualism. If in his earlier stories and first novel he tends to
associate the body with a decadent chronos and the mind with a
transcendent kairos, then in Count Zero he further confuses the two
realms and complicates his allegiances. Originally cyberspace was
equated with personal and cultural memory in Gibson's imagination,
and the implication was that personal and cultural memory could be
liberating; now the very idea of memory causes one of the protagonists,
Turner, to vomit. While Bobby's cyberspace deck still leads out of
the meat world and into a dazzlingly imaginative realm, other virtual
gateways are hardly as appealing. Bobby's holoporn unit, for
instance, seems "dated and vaguely ridiculous" (28). The
biosoft containing Mitchell's dossier is less a window to a
hyperreality for Turner than one to vertigo and nausea. Marly realizes,
in a Baudrillardian trope, that "the sinister thing about a simstim
construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any
environment might be unreal.... Mirrors, someone had once said, were in
some way essentially unwholesome" (139-40). More than enough
evidence for this can be found in Bobby's mother's addiction
to soap operas with their multiheaded plots curling into themselves like
tapeworms. If the television, video games, and walkmen that formed the
basis for cyberspace once held fascination and the possibility of
postmodern bliss for Gibson, those icons of simulation ("machines
of reproduction rather than production" [Jameson 329]) now hold
disorientation and the possibility of addictive banality. Gibson's
ambivalence unravels.

26 Disembodied. And yet and yet and yet. Bobby Newmark's (the
easy new mark's) plot line in Count Zero involves his education
into the spiritual nature, the divine possibility, of the disembodied
realm of the matrix.

A fledgling hacker living with his mother in Barrytown, New Jersey,
Bobby rents an icebreaker from a software dealer named Two-a-Day and
flatlines almost immediately upon trying to use it, only to be saved by
Angie's presence that appears to him in the matrix as Vyej Mirak,
voodoo goddess of miracles.

(Upon Wintermute-Neuromancer's fragmentation at the end of
Gibson's first novel, loa overrun cyberspace. Wigan Ludgate, one of
the first to intuit the spiritual dimension of the matrix, begins
worshiping these deities from his high orbit home in the Tessier-Ashpool
cores. Oungans such as Beauvoir and Lucas do the same on earth, thereby
assuming the role of wizards in fantasy, educating acolytes like Bobby
in the mystical ways of the voodoo gods. Unlike the virtuous saints,
angels, and other religious virtualities that form traditional
Christianity, these loa are lusty, greedy, street savvy, potentially
harmful, and unpredictable.)

A large part of the idea for them came from Carole Devillers's
National Geographic article, "Haiti's Voodoo Pilgrimages: Of
Spirits and Saints," which Gibson read while working on Count Zero.
In this piece, Devillers gives a brief account of voodoo beliefs, gods,
and celebrations. Gibson found at least four of the essay's basic
ideas appealing. First, he registered the fact that voodoo is a hybrid
religion that blends two faiths. The Creole name for voodoo is vodou,
which in turn comes from vodun, a word that means spirit in the language
of the Fon people of Benin and Nigeria. Brought to Haiti as slaves by
the French in the seventeenth century, these West Africans were
forbidden to practice their ancestral religion and were pressured into
converting to Roman Catholicism. In the process, they merged components
of their traditional religion with components of the European one. The
result was a third religion in which ancestral spirits took on the names
of Catholic saints. Part of the role of this religion's oungan, or
priest, is to serve with both hands, to practice black magic as well as
voodoo. Appropriate to Gibson's world, voodoo is both a spiritual
collage and originally an outlaw religion, created by those whom the
dominant society marginalized. While Gibson satirizes conventional
religion by identifying it in this novel with Bobby's crazed
mother, he treats voodoo with greater seriousness, implying that it has
roots in opposition and exists, at least in its Hollywood stereotypes,
in a dark realm of potential danger, mystery, and intrigue. It is,
according to Beauvoir in Count Zero, a "street religion" that
"came out of a dirt-poor place" (77). Moreover, the idea of
overlaying one universe of discourse (African ancestral religion) upon
another (Roman Catholicism) suggests the same kind of multiplicity
Gibson achieves when overlaying the language of technology (subprograms)
upon the language of religion (loa). Like the voodoo oungans,
Gibson's text serves with both hands.

Second, Gibson found voodoo's notion of god appropriate to a
computer society. According to African-Haitian belief, god is Gran Met,
or the great maker of heaven and earth. But, as Beauvoir puts it, this
god is "too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is
poor, or you can't get laid" (Count Zero 77). Too powerful and
important to concern himself directly with mere human beings, the Gran
Met sends down his loa to possess and communicate with them. The
voodooist must consult with these loa before embarking on any serious
activity. Often the loa will "ride" an individual without
warning, sending him or her into dance, trance, or song. And often this
takes place at a lieu saint, or holy place, such as among a stand of
trees that are considered natural temples. In Gibson's world,
Neuromancer-Wintermute is literally remote from humans, buried within
the Tessier-Ashpool cores in high orbit. Only Wigan Ludgate feels its
presence in any profound way. Its loa, however, exist in the matrix on
earth and do deals with the likes of Beauvoir, Lucas, and Mitchell. They
ride Angie. And they are associated with Two-a-Day, whose home is filled
with trees, from his driftwood coffee table to his stunted forest raised
on gro-lights.

Third, Gibson felt that voodoo's minimalization of afterlife
jibed well with postmodern existence. According to Beauvoir, "it
isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What
it's about is getting things done" (76). This takes the reader
back to the question of human-as-conscious-automaton that Gibson
explored in his first novel. Action in Gibson's world precedes
essence. Thinking and feeling, as Molly knows so well, are secondary to
doing.

Finally, Gibson loved the poetry of the words associated with voodoo
beliefs, gods, and celebrations, and he uses them frequently in Count
Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive for sound as well as sense. While
references abound to such loa as Danbala Wedo (the snake), Ougou Feray
(spirit of war), and Baron Samedi (lord of the graveyards), perhaps most
important are Legba and Ezili Freda. Appropriately enough for a novel
about computers, the former is the loa of communications and is
associated with Bobby, the console cowboy. Legba is identified with St.
Peter, Christian doorkeeper of heaven, and in voodoo rituals must always
be invoked first; if not, the other loa might not listen. The latter,
also known as Vyej Mirak, or Our Lady Virgin of Miracles, is the loa of
love and associated with Angie, who protects others from evil. Ezili
Freda is identified with the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ who shelters
the penitent.

27 Consciousness. From one (yes) perspective, Gibson raises voodoo to
the level of a grand art by basking in its poetic language. From a
different one, he neutralizes its power by suggesting that it is no more
than grand art, poetic language, another historiographic metafiction,
one way among many for organizing the world. Voodoo becomes a construct
through which to describe an event. To this extent Beauvoir is correct
when he asserts that voodoo is "just a structure" (76).
Technology is an equally valid construct through which to describe the
same event. Again, Gibson points to religion and technology as no more
than language games, abstract organizations of data, virtual spaces.
Perhaps the gods in the matrix are real, as Beauvoir and Lucas believe.
Perhaps they are no more than virus programs that have gotten loose in
the matrix and replicated, as Jammer has it. Perhaps both possibilities
are true. From one angle, the events in the matrix can be explained
using the language of science. From another, only the language of the
transcendental will do. Both languages are correct. Both languages are
incorrect.

Another termite (de)center.

28 Into. Hence we once more find ourselves plunged deep
"into" a discussion about insectile indeterminacy,
contradictory possibility. Into a discussion, that is, of postmodernism
itself. Of its alpha and its omega.

At the outset of "Before Postmodernism and After (Part 2),"
Raymond Federman comments:

I wrote a letter to twenty of my friends (writers, critics,
professors, entertainers) asking them to answer these two questions:

1. Do you think Postmodernism is dead?

2. If so, what killed it?

To my great delight, all twenty correspondents replied, but all asked
not to be identified. These are the twenty answers I received.

2. As with all new things, once absorbed by the economy Postmodernism
was finished ...

3. Now that the effects of Postmodernism are evident in sectors as
diverse as dress, food, and lodging, and are in those forms understood,
the end is not far ...

4. Postmodernism began as a genuine if loose literary movement and
ended as a department store curiosity ...

5. When the academy starts to take sides and quibbles about
Postmodernism, it quickly kills what it discusses ... (Federman 121)

29 The. Determinate article. There may be no place for it in this
essay.

30 Consensual. At one point in Mona Lisa Overdrive, Angie's
leading man tells her an artificial intelligence named Continuity is
writing a book. When Angie asks what the book is about, the leading man
explains it "looped back into itself and constantly mutated;
Continuity was always writing it." Angie asks why.
"Because," she is told, "Continuity was an AI, and
AI's did things like that" (42-43). This serves nicely as a
gloss on Gibson's own attempt to conclude the cyberspace trilogy.
The artificial intelligence, aptly named Continuity, suggests Gibson
himself, whose tremendously complex plot line involving Wintermute,
Neuromancer, and their offspring has constantly turned back into itself
and mutated throughout the termite course of his short stories and
novels. To this extent, Continuity is one more artist figure in a
fiction filled with them. Interestingly, there is also an edge of
weariness, even frustration, present in the statement: Continuity, after
all, is always writing because that's what AIs must do; that is how
they are wired. The artist, in other words, has become an artificial
intelligence writing out of necessity rather than desire. The result of
that writing might be technically efficient, but it might also be
relatively colorless. Certainly this is the perception many readers have
about Gibson's least critically successful novel. In one of its
most negative reviews, Paul Kincaid notes that "Gibson wrote one
book of stunning originality which caught the mood of the time so
successfully that he has been condemned to repeat it. By this third
volume he is showing clear and dramatic improvement as a writer, but is
doing nothing fresh with his talent." Why? There are nearly no new
ideas or themes in Mona Lisa Overdrive: Gibson quotes Gibson quoting
Gibson. Too, for all of Gibson's fairly fresh concentration on
characterization in Mona Lisa Overdrive, Kumiko Yanaka, his first
fictional child and a key figure in the novel, remains unconvincing.
Despite his problems with conventional characterization, Gibson has
continued his narratological drift toward more traditional, more
consensual, story and discourse. And, most important for the purposes of
this essay, the reader spends less time in cyberspace in Mona Lisa
Overdrive than he or she did in Gibson's earlier works, and the
time she or he does spend in it is far less dazzling and surreal than
before, yet cyberspace is perhaps the most original and captivating element of the trilogy's virtual geography.

31 Hallucination. Bobby Newmark, one of the protagonists of Mona Lisa
Overdrive, has come closer than anyone in the trilogy to voluntarily
leaving the meat world behind and entering the pure realm of the mind.
Existing almost solely within the aleph, he pays little attention to his
slowly wasting body.

Shortly after the events in Count Zero, Bobby Newmark breaks up with
Angie and appears in Mexico City with a neuroelectronic addiction. He
obtains an aleph, a huge biochip with nearly unlimited storage capacity,
from 3Jane who gives it to him in order to get in touch with the loa or
subprograms that have begun fading in the matrix. 3Jane, in a bid for
immortality similar to that of her mother's in Neuromancer, used
most of her family's wealth to build the aleph. Upon completion,
she put her personality construct inside it and died. A petty thief
delivers Bobby to Dog Solitude jacked into the aleph. He asks Gentry and
Slick to watch him. Gentry, a computer cowboy in search of the overall
shape of the matrix, becomes interested in Bobby and the aleph because
he believes the latter might provide the grail for which he has been
questing. Mercenaries representing 3Jane's interests attack the
Factory in an attempt to retrieve the aleph. In the midst of the ensuing
battle, Molly appears with Mona and Angie, saying that she has made a
deal with the loa or subprograms to get Angie and Bobby together in the
aleph. In return, the loa or subprograms will cause her criminal record
to be erased. Angie's construct enters the aleph after her death.

The aleph, loaded with all the components of Bobby's history, is
one more metaphor for memory but is also significantly distinct from its
seeming double, the cyberspace matrix. Whereas the matrix represents
consensual or communal memory, the aleph represents personal memory. It
is self-contained, functions without connection to the matrix. Over the
course of the narrative, Bobby discovers he must enter, confront, and
make peace with his past. He must come to terms with his relationship to
Angie and 3Jane in order to find contentment. He learns to live an
increasingly spiritual and private existence. Bobby searches the aleph
for an answer to why the matrix changed following Wintermute's
union with Neuromancer: Bobby looks for a metanarrative. At the same
time Gibson announces this spiritual dimension to existence, however, he
also undercuts it in at least two ways. First, he indicates that the loa
or subprograms have begun fading in the matrix. The spiritual has begun
disappearing at the very moment it is sought - as though to seek after
the spiritual is somehow to be doomed to miss it. Second, Gibson does
not allow Bobby to attain the goal of his quest. The novel ends with
Finn promising him enlightenment "in a New York minute" (260).
The goal of the quest becomes the quest. Termite process takes
precedence over white-elephant outcome. The reality becomes the
hallucination.

32 That. "Order and accord are again established,"
Kumi's father asserts, apparently seriously, at the conclusion of
Mona Lisa Overdrive (242). Peace is made among the Yakuza in Japan as
well as between Kumi and her father. Angie learns to forgive 3Jane. In a
disconcertingly idyllic last chapter, Angie and Bobby are happily
married after death, a futuristic Catherine and Heathcliff. Molly, the
embodiment of cyberpunk consciousness, subversive intensity, retires as
mercenary. That is what we are left with.

7. Because Postmodernism was viewed both as a movement and a perfume,
and both as an intellectual disposition and a bowl of fruit, it had no
chance to survive ... (Federman 122)

That is not what we are left with. Gibson produces a series of highly
complex interconnected plot lines while continuing to experiment with
technique and language. Bobby and Angie's "marriage"
takes place, after all, in a "France that isn't France"
(258) and may, without too much polymorphous perversity, be read
parodically, that virtual cosmos within the aleph serving as a ludicrous
image of the conventional novel, which exists in a radically other space
than that of Dog Solitude. As Slick reminds the reader, the cosmos of
the aleph is "not a place ..., it only feels like it." It
smacks of "fairytale" (149).

14. The current reactionary literary climate dominated by works in
received forms does not indicate the death of Postmodernism as much as
the persistence of the power of market economies to define the arts.
(Federman 122)

Gibson gives the reader a traditionally happy ending and reminds her
or him of the artificiality of such innocent structures. He generates
inconclusiveness at the very moment of apparent conclusion, which,
however, calculatedly cries out for yet another financially successful
sequel.

33 Was ...

20. It isn't, to say it again, that Postmodernism is dead but
like any other identifiable phenomenon of a certain value - such as
Impressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism,
New Criticism, Feminism - after a fixed period of bubbling at the
surface, it sinks and recombines with other like elements to form again
part of the generative stew of art and culture, and that moment of rot
is called the death of a movement.... (Federman 123)

34 The. Determinate article. There may be a ...

35 Matrix. Mother, womb, every ...

ENDING ONE: TERMITE DEATH

The matrix plays no part in Gibson's fourth, longest, and most
complex novel, The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling and
revolving around an alternate reality in which the Victorian inventor
Charles Babbage computerized our culture nearly a century before the
fact. In Virtual Light, the future-present has lost the mystical aspects
of cyberspace dominating Gibson's earlier trilogy. In its place
appears a universe almost completely rooted in the meat world. Replacing
the high-intensity apocalyptic prose associated with cyberspace, the
bleak flat tone associated with the trilogy's world, is a (dark)
humor akin to the bright cartoonish mischief of Pynchon: a psychokiller
with the Last Supper tattooed on his chest; a woman who visits San
Francisco to retrieve her husband's cryogenically frozen brain from
a tank of them so it does not have to feel so crowded in the afterlife.
The complex and deeply spiritual exploration of cyberspace that pervaded
the trilogy thereby gives way to very funny, if very easy, parody that
flags the essential narratological problem Gibson, now forty-five and a
postmodern icon himself, has had to wrestle with since the publication
of Neuromancer more than a decade ago: is it possible to keep the news
new, the action vigorous, without skidding off the novel road into the
ditch of self-replication?

ENDING TWO: TERMITE DEATH

Clearly the answer is yes, and the way Gibson goes about it is by
dosing his text with a powerful hit of comic vision that takes nothing
(including itself) very seriously. The fresh infusion of humor into his
writing takes down the seriousness of his own textual texture and grim
futurist ideas before someone else has a chance to, destabilizes them in
a flourish typical of termite art.

ENDING THREE: TERMITE DEATH

Clearly the answer is no. Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson's previous
solo effort, is set in the Hollywoodish world of Sense/Net, focuses on
the manipulation of young stars by various financial concerns, and is
shot through with the thematization of commercial sellout. When writing
it, Gibson was simultaneously beguiled by the glamour and goods
associated with that dimension and bent on satirizing its commodifying
impulse. The consequence is a Janus-text that looks toward accessibility
and tameness, on the one hand, and toward disruptive innovation on the
other. Something along the same lines could be argued with respect to
Virtual Light. For all its flash and burn, there is nothing trailblazing about it. Chevette Washington, that bike messenger, has stolen those VL
glasses (which provide only a pale simulacrum of the cyberspace we find
in the trilogy) from a man who turns out to be a gopher for (what else
but this?) a major corporation with some plans to rebuild the San
Francisco skyline. Add to this narratological algebra one Berry Rydell,
a good-cop-gone-(accidentally)-bad, attach him to Chevette, and you have
a variation of the Molly-Case team from Neuromancer, the Angie-Turner
one from Count Zero, and the Angie-Bobby one from Mona Lisa Overdrive,
all edge-dwellers in their own ways, all caught in the complex workings
of megacorporations uninterested in the human or humane, and all
inhabiting a hard-boiled slightly stereotypical naturalist narrative
universe with at least as much in common with Nelson Algren's The
Man With the Golden Arm as with such protocyberpunk works as Alfred
Bester's The Demolished Man or Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork
Orange.

ENDING FOUR: TERMITE DEATH

Clearly the answer is yes. The speed of Gibson's sentences, his
narrative, and his imagination are nothing short of spectacular, all
enhancing the deeper reason we read him or think we read him: his
vision, his ability through the SF genre to cause us to think about what
is important to think about, to startle us out of our perpetual
narcosis, to move us (like much so-called cyberpunk fiction does) into a
terrain of crucial cultural issues that most other contemporary fiction
does not care about, let alone explore: from anarchist hacker
underground networks to the rise of religious fundamentalism, cryogenics
to surveillance satellites, genetic engineering to nanotechnology,
multinational control of information to techno-angst, the Japanization
of Western culture to the decentralization of governments around the
world. And it is for these reasons, not to mention the pivotal

remains one of the most dynamic, significant,

and

or place under

late

ifies even as it demystifies, thereby obviously. But this goes
without saying. Or does it? From

Lance Olsen, associate professor at the University of Idaho, is
author and editor of many books, including the novel Tonguing the
Zeigeist, the critical study Lolita: A Janus-Text, and the collection In
Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-pop (with Mark Amerika).

COPYRIGHT 1995 Northern Illinois University
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.